| >genetic modifications are usually for stuff like "keeping potatoes from bruising because people don't like the look of bruised potatoes." Or "keeping tomatoes flavorful so people can keep mindlessly buying them out of season." They're always fixes that allow the consumer to remain as passive as possible. I think this is because biotechnology is in its infancy, and these sort of things tend to be pretty low hanging fruit that increase sales. I'm not a big fan either- I'm certainly not a big fan of corporate profits and corporate motives. The GMO world is corporate right now because it still requires substantial monetary investment- in the future technology will become so simplified that nonprofits and university scientists will be able to bring non-corporate GMOs to market in the way we have open source software today. Here are some more positive gmo projects on the horizon: C4 rice: http://c4rice.irri.org/index.php/component/content/article/1... More efficient photosynthesis:https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/science/gmo-foods-phot... Disease resistant Cassava:http://staskawiczlab.berkeley.edu/michael-gomez-wins-prize-h... Disease resistant tomatoes: http://staskawiczlab.berkeley.edu/bacterial-spot-tomatoes Drought resistant plants in particular will be extremely important for fighting climate change: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2015/03/31/g... >b) I've never hear a single scientist make a good argument against GMOs. What, like you can't come up with a single possible downside? It is difficult to come up with an argument "against GMOs", because most definitions of the term have no ingerent biological meaning. If I edit a single base pair of a plant using crispr-cas9, is that a GMO? How is that different than breeding this plant until I get that base pair change by chance? If I edit an entire gene of a plant with crispr-cas9 to match the gene of another organism, how is that different from inserting the gene from that organism into this plant in the right spot? I personally can't contemplate a general purpose argument against GMOs that doesn't apply to traditional mutagenesis and hybridization experiments: those are really like randomly messing with genes with no idea what you're doing- biotechnology targets systems we understand. However, the best arguments against GMOs are those concerned with corporate influence. Yes, we do not want big corporations completely controlling our agricultural system (as they do now), especially when their interests do not align with society's. We want a biotechnology more like the open source world and startup world to keep agriculture innovative and open. |